PC Version Release Update and Progress Report

It has been a while since our initial September 12th announcement, and we apologize for the delay in communication and would like to issue an update on progress for Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of DANA on PC. We were taking our time to be absolutely sure we were delivering the most accurate and up-to-date information to you.

Since we last made an announcement, we have been working tirelessly on improvements and bug fixes. We considered the overall issues, obstacles that arose during debug, and the maximum resources we have to address them and concluded that it will take another two months for the Steam release to meet the expectations we set for ourselves and guarantee the quality that every Ys fan has come to expect. In addition, we will use this time to apply the updated localization to the game[nisamerica.com].

This means that we plan to release the PC version around mid-December. We were unfortunately unable to deliver a simultaneous release with the Steam and console versions and apologize for our delayed postponement announcement. We deeply and earnestly apologize for not upholding the promise of the original Steam release and not notifying the community about the delays sooner.

Despite our missteps, we remain committed to delivering the best possible quality experience. With that in mind, here are some details about what exactly we’ve been working on.

After we delayed the release of Ys VIII on Steam, we reached out to Peter "Durante" Thoman for his expertise, and we are happy to report that he could share some of his hours with our developers these past few weeks. We asked Durante for his help with the following for this title: GPU performance improvements, CPU performance improvements, and developing a system for improving and regulating framerate. We also received feedback from Durante about a shadow rendering issue that we are looking into.

The above work has resulted in significant improvements in performance. However, due to the fact that we are receiving such an overwhelming number of system issues from both our internal QA Team and our Beta testers, these issues will take considerable time to repair. As previously stated in our last announcement, fixes in one area can lead to something breaking in another, so we have to be methodical in our application of fixes and improvements. In addition to improvements in the game’s system, we are also updating, fixing, and improving the game text across the Japanese, English, and French versions. This also requires a significant amount of time, due to the size of the game and our commitment to localizing the text to both English and French.

After assessing all of these factors, we concluded that approximately two more months of development time is needed to reach the level of quality we and the fans want. We thank you for your constant feedback and again apologize for the inconsistent communication. If you have made a pre-purchase on Steam and would like to get a refund, please use this link for information on how to refund a product on Steam. For any purchases or pre-orders made outside of the Steam platform, please contact the corresponding refund support for that platform.

We sincerely apologize for these delays and we humbly request your patience.Best,NISA Team